An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Two Coats of Paint invited painter Kim Uchiyama to sit down with Michael Brennan to discuss “Floating Weeds,” Brennan’s fourth solo show at Minus Space. In their wide-ranging conversation, they discuss Japanese film, Russell Lee’s photographs, Charles Olson’s poetry, Venetian lagoons, architect Carlo Scarpa, Homer, and more.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / “A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson in another context. As much as I respect institutional Minimalism, economy in painting excites me more, and what could be more economical than a three-person, three-painting exhibition presented in a 135-square-foot space with one empty wall? Artist Mark Sengbusch has scrupulously curated “3 Painters” at Field of Play in Gowanus in accord with his own personal Periodic Table, in which each artist represents a specific Element. Charlotte Hallberg is field, Clare Grill is air, and Victoria Roth is depth.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Pierre Obando presents ten paintings, made between 2021 and 2025, in “Some Kind…,” his first exhibition at the Bushwick salon Starr Suites. While his imagery is for the most part recognizably organic, it is not easily decipherable.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / I have long admired the work of the three artists Michelle Segre and Guy Corriero, whose work is now on display at “Fly like a Flea, Sink like a Stone” at Springs Projects, as well as Claire Seidl, whose show “Days Like These” is up at Helm Contemporary.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / “Vicissitudes of Nature” is the magisterial title of Jen Mazza’s first solo exhibition with Ulterior Gallery, and, given the calamitous start of 2025, her Cassandra-like premonitions could hardly be any timelier. Nearly two dozen paintings and works on paper occupy the top floor of the tin-tiled, pitched-ceilinged space. Deftly and seamlessly, Mazza uses a variety of techniques and strategies, appropriating images from multiple sources. The idea is to conflate them with important cultural signifiers while recontextualizing them into new narratives of interiority, as, say, Virginia Woolf did in her contemplation of “the waves” in her eponymous novel, quoted in the show.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / To my mind, the cultivation of art is mainly about making distinctions, and Cyrilla Mozenter’s solo show “Problems of Art” at 57W57 Arts hits that mark. She is essentially a sculptor – and a great one – in that she makes beautiful objects. Much as I admire her approach to volume, though, it’s her novel transformation of drawing into predominantly felt sculpture – decisive cuts made with sewing shears, silk whipstitching like super-sutures – that generates the greatest sense of adventure.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / A while ago, with a half dozen adventurous galleries operating, a new art corridor seemed to be emerging on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. This made geographical sense. Brooklyn was reaching critical mass in terms of artist residents, and the street itself was long and central, with excellent public transportation access…
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Tappeto Volante Gallery in Gowanus is audaciously hosting a condensed retrospective spanning decades of Bascha Mon’s painting, selected and arranged by the artist herself. Her more recent work dominates the gallery’s anterior space, with paintings from the 1970s – which remain integral to her ongoing inquiry – populating the rear room….
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Many conceptualists, favoring the unconstrained and expansive, balk at the representation or framing of any experience as image. Long after he abandoned painting, the late installation artist Robert Irwin likened it to a mere “keyhole” of perception. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig declared that compartmentalizing experience for viewing made you “a passive observer” for whom “it’s all moving by you boringly in a frame.” Yet surely not every living experience has to be as open-ended as a motorcycle racing across salt flats. While a painting can never capture the full immensity of life, with adequate perception and economy of means – say, Luke Howard’s vision of the sky realized in paper and watercolor – even a diminutive one can provide a meaningful distillation of experience. The paintings of Eleanor Ray, now on display in her third solo show at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, constitute abundant evidence.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / On about 200 square feet of AstroTurf, artist-run Field of Play, which opened in 2022 in Gowanus, is a tiny gallery with big ambitions, staging adventurous exhibitions and offering health and wellness programs aimed at creative people and enterprises. “Bumper Crop,” curated by artist and gallery founder Matt Logsdon, includes work by artists carrie R, Estefania Velez Rodriguez, and Rachel Yanku. Timed to coincide with the autumnal equinox, she show’s theme is the garden – an intriguingly ironic premise, given that the gallery is located next to an EPA Superfund site, the Gowanus Canal.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / As a boy, the sculptor Tony Smith – a canonically important and under-appreciated American sculptor who connects AbEx and Minimalism, equally at home with Pollock and Serra – suffered from tuberculosis so severe that his father built him a small shed in the backyard of their South Orange, New Jersey, home, with fiberglass curtains to minimize dust and a small black stove. Smith lived in the spartan outbuilding for several years. Imaging him there might elicit the melancholy that Van Morrison conveys in his aching ballad “T.B. Sheets.” As an adult, however, Smith noted an upside, at least for an artist: “If one spends a long time in a room with only one object, that object becomes a little god.” I grasped the significance of this observation acutely when I encountered Mark Dagley’s sloop-like sculpture Vāyu-Vāta, which, pointed away from a black radiator and darkly mullioned window, dominates the Abaton Project Room in the Financial District.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / The 60th Venice Biennale runs through the fall. This storied, much imitated global event, like an Olympics or World’s Fair, consists of individual national pavilions and topical exhibitions. They occupy Venice’s Giardini and Arsenale. The Biennale generates numerous collateral exhibitions in palazzos, churches, and former warehouse spaces citywide. In addition to the officially sanctioned shows, there are a myriad unaffiliated exhibitions that try to pass themselves off as part of the Biennale by insinuation. It’s a lot to take in.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Haul Gallery is in the light industrial section of Gowanus, an area typically defined by one- and two-story brick buildings faced with rolling metal gates. These house local non-chain businesses cast as, for instance, “Tool Rental,” “Collision Repair,” and “Switch Electric.” DOS Garbage Trucks, a surplus of Park Slope ambulances, and old-style levered voting machines are warehoused nearby. Big-box stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s are present, too. Uncharacteristic patches of big sky often appear above, bisected by a gargantuan elevated section of the BQE. In 2024, post-pandemic NYC, a truly adventurous art space, and perhaps an alternative model, has also emerged in the neighborhood. Premised on the defiantly alternative anti-manifesto of founders Erin Davis and Max C. Lee, the gallery awards residencies to artists who then use the space to present exhibitions. Currently featured there is Charlotte Zinsser’s first solo show. Zinsser’s aesthetic is distinctive, refreshingly peculiar, and not easily categorized. I think of her broadly as a conceptual collator of Americana in the tradition of artists like Walker Evans and William Christenberry.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / If you are interested in the ongoing relevance or advancement of landscape, Ron Milewicz’s current exhibition “Second Sight” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery is for you. Milewicz, who has taught for decades, is an expert hand at drawing, painting, and, most importantly, seeing.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / As a close follower of the emerging art core in South Brooklyn, I seldom miss an exhibition at Yi Gallery. Its shows are invariably interesting and novel, perfectly and poetically installed. The primary space is currently featuring a nicely integrated two-person show of Xingze Li and Sarah Pater’s work, with individual exhibitions for each artist in the back.
